To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact (Charles Darwin)

Friday, February 03, 2006

Israeli terror in a divided nation

Ibrahim Youssef Rhayyel was found dead inside the Lebanese border on Wednesday, reportedly killed by 3 Israeli bullets, UNIFIL confirmed on Thursday. He was a 17-year-old shepherd. A shotgun was found near his body. Around the same time of the murder, an Israeli reconnaissance plane violated Lebanese airspace, flying over Tyre, Sidon, and Naameh.

The Israeli army claimed they fired at a "an armed man with binoculars [who] was seen crossing the U.N.-demarcated border. When he opened fire, Israeli soldiers responded and apparently hit him." The location of the body seems to refute that claim, even though the results of the autopsy said the boy was shot from a distance of 50 meters. There were reports in the National News Agency and in as-Safir that claimed an Israeli commando unit had infiltrated the border.

By Friday, UN secretary general still had not received UNIFIL's report confirming this was an Israeli operation.

The UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesperson Stephane Dujjaric said: "The UN cannot comment on the incident until they have received a formal copy of the investigations. As far as we are concerned, the investigations are ongoing."

This cold and insensitive statement was used by Hizbullah as proof that "most of the Lebanese people, did not trust the international body to take action against Israel."

"We don't even expect them to denounce the incident," Nayef Mousawi, Hizbullah's "foreign affairs official" said, referring to the statement above. "We know how to take our rights with our own hands."

Hizbullah will probably retaliate soon. Now that Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora has re-conferred the "national resistance" title upon them, paving the way for the militant organization to end its 6-week boycott of the cabinet, they will continue to act as Lebanon's only defense force against Israeli aggression.

This begs the following question. The Lebanese flag wrapped around Ibrahim’s coffin notwithstanding, must we keep the issue of retaliation to Israeli terrorism the sole property of Hizbullah? Jumblatt has reiterated his call for sending the Lebanese army to the south and reviving the armistice treaty with Israel. And yeah, settling the ridiculous Shebaa farm dispute, where the shepherd was killed. Had the issue been resolved, had there been an army in the south, then the Lebanese government’s condemnation of Israel would have found more ears in the world. And maybe Rhayyel's father would have asked the government, not Hizbullah, to avenge his son's death.

Blame Israel, blame American bias towards Israel, blame Hizbullah, blame Syria, and even blame the shameful international and UN silence, but also blame a cabinet weakened by indecisiveness. We have been demanding that Syria respect our sovereignty. We have rightly rejected Syrian plans to hijack that sovereignty. We ask the same of Israel, yet our efforts to deal with that struggle are hampered by this unwillingness to take on the issue directly. How will Israel be stopped if we don’t seem to care about establishing an official presence on the southern border? Let them try violating our airspace and killing our people with our army on the border. Then watch Lebanese rally around their national army and state, as opposed to an unrepresentative religious militia. Give Lebanese the opportunity to own and direct that struggle.

The resistance against Israel should not be run the way it is run today. It needs to involve all of Lebanon. All Lebanese should have cried at the picture of the relatives weeping over the dead boy's body. It should have had the same domestic and international impact Syrian terrorism has. However, the south continues being the property of a militia and not the Lebanese government. And Lebanon remains divided. The return of the five ministers and Siniora’s word game will do little to reunite the country, let alone stop Israel.

UPDATE. As expected, Hizbullah has retaliated. Their guerillas fired rockets at an Israeli army post in the Shebaa farms on Friday.

No Zionist crime in Lebanon will go unpunished. The Hizbollah back its words with deeds. The Phalangists and Aounists will now probably rush to condemn the Hizbollah's actions in short order. Pathetic lot, they are.

Stop calling the Hizbollah a militia. Even the anti-Syrian government in Beirut denies the Hizbollah is a militia. Jumblatt would not support an armistice treaty now. One of his MPs came down to southern Lebanon yesterday and demanded the Hizbollah retaliate against the Israeli aggression against Lebanon. If Israel attacks Iran, the Hizbollah retaliation against northern Palestine will be even more severe.

Saudi Arabia is allowed to install its subservient puppets (be they bearded Hamas-style, or neatly shaved à la Saniura & Co.) at the helm in Beirut and Jericho, its diplomats are allowed to provide cash and explosives to all sorts of bloodthirsty terrorist organizations from the southern Philippines to north Lebanon (who kill hundreds of innocent Christian civilians every year that Allah makes), while king Abdullah Ibn Saud and faux sheikh Saad Al-Hariri shake hands with Dick Cheney on the White House lawn…

On the other hand, Hizbullah has only targeted Israeli soldiers and rightwing paramilitaries posing as “settlers” in occupied Lebanese lands: they never killed a single Israeli or Western civilian, unlike Hamas, Fatah, and other Saudi-sponsored organizations.

An early Palestinian preacher named Matthew once said the following:"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye." (Matthew, 7:3-5)

Straightshooter, Who gave HA the authority to sign a bilateral defense agreement with Iran????? How sad it is when residents of a country; and I did not say citizens on purpose; openly pledge allegiance to the political leaders of another country. What is worse is that they are proud of it!!! I can understand a committment to a higher cause than the nation state, to Cosmopolitanism, but I cannot understand what makes people seek to retrograde to tribalism and bigotry. I guess some will do whatever it takes to prove Darwin wrong. Go ahead, cut your nose to spite your face.

You want us to believe that it’s OK for faux sheikh Saad and aspiring-sheikh Saniura to call a foreign head of state (king Abdullah Ibn Saud) the “noble leader of our Ummah”…I wonder which Ummah they’ve sworn allegiance to though: the Pan-Hambali nation of sheikh Ibn Baz, a man king Abdullah and Osama Bin Laden both called “the brightest theologian of our time”?The same Ibn Baz who was Saudi Arabia’s longest serving “Grand Mufti” and openly called for “Nasarah” and “Mataweelah” to choose between Allah’s true faith and death?

Today, as the barrel of oil stands at 65 dollars, self-proclaimed enemies of General Aoun and Hizbullah such as LBC’s May Chidiac and Al-Nahar’s Ghassan Tueni write lengthy editorials presenting king Abdullah’s “strategic vision of an emerging Arabo-Indo-Asian socio-economic bridge into the 22nd century connecting Riyadh to the world” [??] and the correspondingly “natural role of Saudi monarch Abdalla Ibn Abdul Aziz as supreme standard-bearer of a modern, relaxed form of Pan-Arabism” [sic]

I guess Ghassan Tueni and other “independent” Lebanese journalists will keep on churning out Arabian Caesars as long as those Saudi petrodollars flow generously!

Long before the mercantile cum collaborationist days of MP Saad-Uldînne Hariri and Prime Minister Fuad Seniorita, another famous Middle-Eastern merchant turned politician named Judas Iscariot also sold his soul for cash: his story didn’t end very happily though…

The parents of the Lebanese boy that was MURDERED by the Israelis demanded the Hizbollah avenge his death. Unlike other parties in Lebanon, the Hizbollah kept its word. The Lebanese government can't send troops to defend southern Lebanon because those troops are too weak to handle Israeli aggression. The Hizbollah has proven many times in the past that it can.

Good post Kais! Don't let yourself be discouraged by some of the idiots in the comments section. As we all know they're either baathist, or part of the Opus of fundamentalism - either way they're brainwashed, and you know what they say -- forgive them for they know not what they do.

Hezballah is a militia, has always been a militia, and will always be a militia. They only represent their foreign financier, and could care less about the other Lebanese!

Straight shooter 2:51, You did it again!!! I never suspected for a moment that anyone can muster the capacity to always find a new way of arriving at a faulty conclusion, but you never seem to dissapoint.The issue that is of essence IS NOT whether justice for the death of the Lebanese shepherd should be sought, of course it should, but what is crucially important is the process that is to be followed in seeking such justice. It is precisely that, the process, that differentiates between civilized people who are willing to live their lifes by societal norms and those that have no conception of law and order. Once HA is allowed to "avenge" the death of this young man then would have transformed ourselves into a sorry society made up of gangs, tribes and vegilantes. What a horror to have to drag all of human achievments down these dark alleys and dungeons and uncharted moral abys so that HA can get its revenge. Civilized people do not seek revenge but justice and they accept the infringemnts that society places on their personal desires for the sake of the greater good. Yes at times we have to "accept mutual coercion mutually agreed upon". That is why speed limits ,no parking zones and prohibitions aginst robbing banks or taking away life have been created. Don't insist on leading us into your jungle where life is "nasty and brutish", humanity has already been there and it has rejected that primitive vision of structuring the world.

As for Vic what else can I say? Let me just remind you of what I told you a few days ago. In the same way that ignorance of the law is not an acceptable excuse once a crime has been committed it is not acceptable to plead not guilty only becasue you know of others who have done an equally obnoxcious act but have not been arrested and convicted for it. I don't have the right to kill and maim because somebody else also committed equally abhorent acts. So you think that Sa'ad and Saniora are equally guilty as the members of HA. Does that allow you then to say that under the circumstances the HA crimes should be blessed? Why not argue then that both are wrong and that both need to be held accountable.

It would be nice if Lebanon could conform to the ideals of a Jeffersonian democracy which would allow justice to be avenged through the courts. However, southern Lebanon is a war zone, and no court would ever try the Israeli troops for murdering that Lebanese civilian. So the Hizbollah had to act to defend its people!

Mohamad, blogger was down for most of saturday and all of the comments posted after 10pm on Friday got deleted, including mine. I tried to post a note but that got deleted too. Go ahead and post whatever the hell you want.

Mohamad, I think that it would be helpful if readers, such as you and me, do not forget that we are "guests/visitors" to the blogs each of which has a rightful owner who can decide whenever he/she deems it necessary to stop using an open access policy. Now we dont want that do we?

Apologies Kais, Actually it was two posts deleted without knowing the reasons, and I thought my 'light' criticism is the reason!And I agree with ghassan you have all the right to delete whatever, but the poster would expect an explanation.. or not?

About Me

After dabbling in traditional journalism, the journey from Beirut to the beltway left me free and anonymous in the blogosphere, where I transcend geography and write about Lebanon from a towering spot inside the capital beltway.